GULAM RASOOL SANTOSH | UNTITLED

Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi

Private Collection, Maryland

Acquired from the above in 2017

Gulam Rasool Santosh is one of the doyens of the Indian Neo- Tantric art movement in India, the country’s most significant undertaking of spiritual art. Neo- tantric Art was seen as a unique and powerful counterpoint, not only to the preponderance of figuration in Indian art but also to a dominant American Abstraction. The main premise of the movement was implementing ancient tantric iconographies and subsequently reinterpreting them by reducing them to abstractions, culminating in the construction of a fresh aesthetic language.

In 1964, Santosh had a mystical experience that was to have a profound effect on his work. ‘I went to Amarnath in the sixties, purely as an artist-tourist. But the truth is, that unknown to me, this yatra (journey/pilgrimage) changed my life, the way I think. Upon my return from the yatra, a ‘new’ poetry was born.’ (K. Singh, Awakening: A Retrospective of G.R. Santosh, Delhi Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2011, p. 39) Santosh became fascinated by religious traditions within Kashmiri Shaivism, a branch of Indian philosophy. This came to influence his art as the awareness and consciousness that stemmed from frequent meditation and practice of Tantra took form in his paintings as transcendent imagery.

Many of the Tantric works, especially from the early 1970s, such as this one, were engulfed in black borders and backgrounds. Here, we see a vertically symmetrical picture plane consisting of a female figure. Santosh has decorated the body with yantras, or sacred geometrical symbols, that signify the regenerative aspects of consciousness. The head is composed of a star and sun form, representing the cosmos in its equivocal state, sharing an axis with the geometric tantric shape at the abdomen. The curved contours delineate a voluptuous feminine aspect, softening the angular lines representing the female principle of divine energy and power that first creates and then preserves the universe. For Santosh color signified light and thus played an important role in his art as we see here.